Finitude After After Finitude A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF

82 Pages·2014·0.56 MB·English

by  Jay Frank

Finitude After After Finitude

A THESIS
SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
BY

Jay Alexander Frank

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF
MASTER OF ARTS

Dr. Ronald Walter Greene

June 2014
© Jay Alexander Frank 2014
ABSTRACT

This work represents my efforts to rethink the conspicuous relationship between
philosophical materialism and contemporary rhetorical studies along the lines of the
speculative materialism outlined (primarily) in Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude.
Such an effort represents, for me, an engagement with an institutional problematic on
both practical and historical-theoretical levels. With that in mind, I have constructed my
argument in two parts. Cast as an allegory to Michael Calvin McGee’s influential essay
“A Materialist’s Conception of Rhetoric,” the first portion of this work examines the
historical evolution of theories of materialist rhetoric as a response to an antecedent turn
towards hermeneutics in rhetorical criticism. I claim that, although they represent
complex institutional responses to the contemporary hermeneutic tradition in rhetoric,
what have been called “materialist” theories of rhetoric do not fundamentally escape that
tradition, and therefore have very little to do with materialism. In part two, I examine
Slavoj Zizek’s speech at Occupy Wall Street on October 9, 2011. In doing so I uncover
some analytical difficulties that the “human microphone” poses for both “hermeneutic”
and “materialist” rhetoric, and offer alternative connections to philosophy as new ways
for rhetoricians to discuss proletarian organization.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ......................................................................................................................... i
TABLE OF CONTENTS .................................................................................................... ii
PART ONE: A (SPECULATIVE) MATERIALIST’S CONCEPTION OF RHETORIC . 1
(Hermeneutic) Correlationism in Rhetoric Defined ........................................................... 6
The “Material” Turn in Rhetoric....................................................................................... 21
Materialist Rhetoric as Traversing a Governing Apparatus ............................................. 22
Materialist Rhetoric as Communicative Labor ................................................................. 26
Materialist Rhetoric as Collective Assembly of Enunciation ........................................... 29
A Speculative Definition of Materialism .......................................................................... 31
Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 42
PART TWO: ON HUMAN MICROPHONES AND THE RHETORICAL SELF-
ASSEMBLY OF THE COMMONS ................................................................................. 51
A Hermeneutic Approach ................................................................................................. 53
A Materialist Approach..................................................................................................... 60
A Speculative Materialist Approach ................................................................................. 67
Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 71
BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................. 74

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PART ONE: A (SPECULATIVE) MATERIALIST’S CONCEPTION OF RHETORIC

The contemporary history of “materialist rhetoric” is the opposite of the broader
history of rhetoric. The broader history of rhetoric, for example, is saturated by the
gravity of a history which dates back to pre-Socratic Greece.1 Even “modernist”
iterations of this history are bound up in reading more “contemporary” thought through
its relation to this tradition.2 What does exist of the scant history of a materialist rhetoric
is itself questionable, given an inconclusive conception of the term. As Michael Calvin
McGee puts it, “[w]ith the possible exception of Kenneth Burke, no one I know of has
attempted to formally advance a material theory of rhetoric.”3 Certainly it is the case that
such a history has expanded since McGee’s seminal essay.4 Materialist rhetoricians,
however, still battle a very different problem: overwhelmed by the multiplicity of the
human practice of rhetoric, the search for rhetorical theory has turned to an attempt to

1 Michael Calvin McGee, “A Materialist’s Conception of Rhetoric,” in Rhetoric, Materiality and Politics,
eds. Barbara Biesecker and John Lucaites (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 17.
2 Some notable examples include: John Bender and David Wellbery, “Rhetoricality: On the Modernist
Rhetoric of Rhetoric,” in The Ends of Rhetoric: History, Theory, Practice, eds. John Bender and David
Wellbery (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1990), 3-39. ; Edwin Black, “Excerpts from Rhetorical
Criticism: A Study in Method,” in Readings in Rhetorical Criticism, ed. Carl Burgchardt (State College:
Strata Publishing, 2010), 55-67.; Hans Georg Gadamer, “On the Scope and Function of Hemenuetical
Reflection,” in Hermeneutics and Modern Philosophy, ed. Bruce Wachterhauser (Albany: SUNY Press,
1986), 277-299.
3 McGee, “A Materialist’s Conception of Rhetoric,” 19.
4 Some notable examples include: Carole Blair, “Reflections on Criticism and Bodies: Parables from Public
Places,” Western Journal of Communication 65, no. 3 (2001): 271-294.; Dana Cloud, “Materiality of
Discourse as Oxymoron: A Challenge to Critical Rhetoric,” Western Journal of Communication 58, no. 3
(1994): 141-163. Ronald Walter Greene, “Another Materialist Rhetoric,” Critical Studies in Mass
Communication 15, no. 1 (1998): 21-41.; Ronald Walter Greene, “Rhetorical Materialism: The Rhetorical
Subject and the General Intellect,” in Rhetoric, Materiality and Politics, eds. Barbara Biesecker and John
Lucaites (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 43-66.; Christian Lundberg, Lacan in Public: Psychoanalysis and
the Science of Rhetoric (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012).
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“formally account for what seems to be an essential part of the human social condition.”5
To that end, materialist rhetoricians are in search of a theory that “thinks of rhetoric as an
object, just as material and as omnipresent as air and water.”6 Such a theory is only
formal, however, if it can adequately describe the materiality of rhetoric; its status as
embodied “rather than merely representational of mental and empirical phenomena.”7 But
what is this so called “material” in the new materialist rhetoric?
Today, the typical theoretical concern with daily rhetorical practice stems in one
way or another from a Marxist notion of historical materialism, and the cutting edge of
rhetorical criticism entails a description of the body as a materialization of rhetorical
practice. The terms “Marxist… historical” and “body as” presume common knowledge of
“materialism.”8 The knowledge which is presumed, I think, is of a “materialism” which is
not worthy of the name, since it does not insist on a philosophical absolute which is “at
once external to thought and in itself devoid of all subjectivity.”9 This phenomenon is not
a new one, though until now it has been associated with an inseparability of the social
from the material. So when Matthew May wrote that the practice of soapbox oratory is a
“material staging ground through which the repetition of certain bodily practices holds
together in a kind of dynamism that lasts at least long enough to mark an impression, not

5 McGee, “A Materialist’s Conception of Rhetoric,” 18.
6 Ibid., 19.
7 Ibid., 19.
8 The latter of these, at the very least, also appears to presume a particular definition of rhetoric. I am
hesitant to implicate this assumption, however, since it is my intent to demonstrate the way in which the
presumed definition of materialism here constitutes a parallel definition of rhetoric.
9 Quentin Meillassoux, “Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition: A Speculative Analysis of the Meaningless
Sign,” trans. Robin Mackay (presentation, Freie Universitat, Berlin, Germany, April 20, 2012), 2.
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only in its own present but also in its potential for spreading out in concentric circles of
time and space from its immediate point of application,” he simultaneously made the
argument that the repetitive act of discoursing-in-a-body is the condition of possibility for
once-and-future activation of some trans-historical revolutionary spirit.10 The body
becomes rhetoric as object. It is the nexus point through which the “material” is held
together as impression. It is not enough, however, to conceive of rhetoric as object for
rhetoric to accede to materialism. One must also be able to conceive of objects without
rhetoric in order to assert the historical capacity of objects to be rhetorical. When the
content of a “reading of class struggle into rhetorical history” asserts the trans-historicity
of that struggle, and when the practical implication of that reading is “a performative
enactment in which the potential of a new world becomes imaginable in the ashes of the
old,” then the implicit claim is that the capacity of laborers to control the means of their
own production is dependent on the occurrence of rhetorical production though which the
new world can be typified: it isn’t a revolution until its composition can be retroactively
identified by the ashes of its historical diffusion.11 What has been called “object” through
much of this tradition is thus not about objects at all, but rather a way of seeing objects as
inseparable from the process of their becoming-rhetorical.
What appears, in materialist rhetoric, to be the obvious alternative is to believe
that relations “come first,” that the essential characteristic of a “materialist” ontology of
rhetoric does not treat rhetoric as an object but instead locates the reality of the

10 Matthew May, Soapbox Rebellion: The Hobo Orator Union and the Free Speech Fights of the Industrial
Workers of the World, 1909-1916 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2013), 10.
11 May, Soapbox Rebellion, 1-5.
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becoming-rhetorical of this or that body assemblage in the very moment of its
enunciation. The problem posed by such an alternative is the classic confrontation
between philosophical logics of difference and identity. Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari’s re-reading of Bergson in A Thousand Plateaus puts the question vividly:
Becomings-animal are neither dreams nor phantasies. They are perfectly real. But which
reality is at issue here? For if becoming animal does not consist in playing animal or
imitating an animal, it is clear that the human being does not "really" become an animal
any more than the animal "really" becomes something else. Becoming produces nothing
other than itself. We fall into a false alternative if we say that you either imitate or you
are. What is real is the becoming itself, the block of becoming, not the supposedly fixed
terms through which that which becomes passes. Becoming can and should be qualified
as becoming-animal even in the absence of a term that would be the animal become. The
becoming-animal of the human being is real, even if the animal the human being
becomes is not; and the becoming-other of the animal is real, even if that something other
it becomes is not. This is the point to clarify: that a becoming lacks a subject distinct from
itself; but also that it has no term, since its term in turn exists only as taken up in another
becoming of which it is the subject, and which coexists, forms a block, with the first. This
is the principle according to which there is a reality specific to becoming (the Bergsonian
idea of a coexistence of very different "durations," superior or inferior to "ours," all of
them in communication).12
We might begin the construction of “materialist” rhetorical theories with “real speeches,”
but if we then aim at the “description, explanation, perhaps even prediction of the
formation of consciousness itself,” we have lost the ability to say that rhetoric is an
object.13 May’s “materialist” theory of rhetoric therefore relies on the notion of rhetorical
practice as a limiting apparatus, since it solidifies the virtual into the actual. It is never an
object, but rather the way in which objects come to be as such through the collective
assembly of enunciation. A speculative materialist theory of rhetoric, in contrast, begins
with the ontological plurality of objects which are necessarily subject to contingency.
Such an approach to rhetorical theory would not aim at making enunciation into a theory

12 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 238.
13 McGee, “A Materialist’s Conception of Rhetoric,” 18-19.
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of limitation or of the severing of the virtual and actual, but rather into a theory of
generation which folds the actual onto the potential.14
With the possible exception of Quentin Meillassoux, no one I know of has
attempted to formally advance a speculative theory of materialism. The task is imposing,
for in many ways the whole world of rhetorical theory would have to be turned upside-
down to resolve a host of complicated philosophical issues. The “kenotypical” capacity
of rhetoric will become a cornerstone of theory-building rather than an interesting
alternative approach to criticism. Rhetorical experience, even thought itself, will have to
be characterized as a historical phenomenon which was preceded by a world which bore
no resemblance to it. Such difficult and controversial concepts as “consciousness” and
“ideology,” “ancestrality” and “necessity” will have to be explored. Various methods of
rhetorical research and theory building will have to be examined, and the mystifications
of “context” and “hermeneutics” resolved and eliminated. Since none of this could occur
without asserting the necessity of contingency, it also will be necessary at every point to
justify similarities between a “materialist” and “hermeneutic” rhetoric on the basis of a
persistent correlation between thinking and Being. Finally, since no rhetoricians have
been essentially concerned with a definition of material which is itself not rhetorical,
apparently heretical rhetorical adaptations of such concepts as “necessity” and “ideology”

14 Here I exchange the word “virtual” with the word “potential,” for a particular reason, which I will return
to later on: when “materialist” rhetoricians (such as May or Greene), they often refer to the virtual as an
unassailable plain of differences, which are not yet “assembled” in this or that way (as this or that text). The
identity of objects under such an interpretation, borrowing from Deleuze, depends on the ontological
priority of difference. In other words, difference precedes identity. For Meillassoux, speculative
materialism provokes an understanding of identity/difference as existing in an endlessly oscillating binary
which progresses alongside the finitude of objects.
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will have to be justified against methodological purists from both of rhetoric’s
“traditions.”15
Because it is the most direct strategy, I do not blush to advertise this essay as an
exercise in fundamental conceptualization: I want to define the term “rhetoric” from a
speculative materialist perspective. My concern is with the creation and application of
rhetorical theories. I do not ask the question What is rhetoric? so much as the question
What makes rhetoric possible? The alternative to a rhetorical correlationism (whether it
be of the hermeneutic or “materialist” variety), I argue, is to think of rhetoric as a
capacity derived from the materiality of language.16 Just as the hard sciences and
theoretical mathematics are controlled by the capacity of matter to be other, so a theory of
rhetoric can be materialist only when derived from the role of the kenotype in the
functioning of language.
(Hermeneutic) Correlationism in Rhetoric Defined
John Bender and David Wellbery give a detailed account of what they believe to
be the genesis of a modern rhetorical tradition after the destruction of (what had hitherto
been) the study of rhetoric at the hands of Romantic and Enlightenment thought. In
evolving from the oratorical tradition of antiquity, rhetoric had, by the time of Kant,
expanded into a role that could not contain the conceptual frameworks of both “science”

15 My reference to “materialist” and “hermeneutic” rhetorical practices is largely a gesture towards terms
which have been used to describe an institutional history that bears a particular orientation to the
relationship between text and context.
16 Although this phrase alone is worth a great deal of discussion, such a discussion might not be productive
(at least as far as I am concerned) without laying some substantial groundwork. I will have occasion to
return to the phrase “materiality of discourse” (albeit in very specific way), though, and what I have to say
until then is merely the “groundwork” to which I am referring.
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